Building a realistic Harrier RC VTOL-aircraft

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“Since more than 30 years our family is fascinated by airplanes as radio controlled models with realistic functions and scale like designs.
The first attempt of building a vertical take off and landing plane started at that time when pretty powerful gasoline driven Impeller-Fans were developed for Jet-Airplanes. It was soon clear for us that we wanted to build a scale like RC Harrier model using this new technology.
A complete fuselage, wings and a new ducting were developed to fulfill this problem. We had a 4.5 year trial and error phase because there simply was not enough power to weight ratio which is the most critical aspect to be solved.
Another critical aspect is the control of automatic leveling during hovering mode of such airplanes. The time went on and also the development of electrical powered motors and light weight batteries started. Today the development is on that stage that electrical powered units are far more efficient and powerful than gasoline driven motors.”

Andreas Siek

“This is when we decided to give our dream a next try. Having sold unfortunately the old fuselage and parts we needed to start from the very beginning. We knew which motor and powering unit in terms of weight, size and thrust to be used for this project. An electrical powered Schübeler 130mm impeller fan (special order) would give us about 10-12 Kilos of thrust.
We then needed a scaled fuselage to fit perfect that power unit to make the plane as small as possible to save weight. Such a model cannot be bought in any shop around the world right now and is therefore a complete prototyping project.”

Andreas Siek

With this motor selected they needed a good 3D model for their designing process. This is when they reached out to TetraVision and we decided to help them. They sent us this small scale model of a Harrier plane.

First step was to get an accurate and highly detailed scan of this model. We used a GOM Atos scanner for this.

In the second step we edited the mesh data to make it a perfectly symmetrical plane. This mesh was then used to create a CAD model.
It was important that the model consisted out of different bodies so that these could in turn be used for the manufacturing process of the larger plane.

“We have asked several service suppliers but honestly no one was willing to support that much or even giving us an offer. Via Google we found this Company in Belgium driven by a nice guy called Jurgen. He started answering question, giving good ideas and supporting us during the whole process to get the exact files we needed…And this also on weekends and until late in the night. So we could not get any better support and help to start with our project. This company is more than recommended if someone needs help for similar projects… Thanks Jurgen for all your support…Will keep you updated on the process of our build.”

Andreas Siek

The gallery below shows the incredible build that the two brothers have made.

They incorporated some nice moving mechanisms, the most important one of course for the VTOL movement.